All-star cast in Side Effects, sexual tensions in The Paperboy and evocative cinematography in Welcome To The Punch.

Side Effects (15)
DVD, Blu-ray, VoD

This type of twisty, complex, glamorously entertaining thriller is typically described as ‘Hitchcockian’. But it’s Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby that’s most notably referenced in the eerie opening shot of this last (but one) cracker by supposedly retiring director Steven Soderbergh: a hint – or is it a red herring? – about the disturbing tale ahead.

For nothing is as it seems in this story that starts as a zeitgeist comment on the yuppie prescription drug culture before teetering into gloriously lurid melodrama. Channing Tatum is a once-golden investment banker released from jail after serving five years for insider trading. His fragile wife, Emily (Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) is prescribed an experimental course of antidepressants by her dashing new psychiatrist (Jude Law), which come with some fatal side effects.

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As an all-star cast, including Catherine Zeta-Jones as a hot therapist in ‘brainy girl’ specs, indicates, this is a class act. Even if you like to solve a thriller ten minutes in, this one is guaranteed to keep you guessing.

The Paperboy (15) DVD,
Blu-ray, VoD

Swamp fever seems to have gripped everyone involved in bringing Pete Dexter’s 1995 novel, The Paperboy, to the big screen.

Lee Daniels’s slice of Southern-fried Gothic is almost bafflingly trashy, revelling in its sweat-soaked sleaziness so much that it’s hard to recall there was a plot at all. It’s easy to be distracted, though, when Nicole Kidman is performing long-range masturbation, or peeing on Zac Efron, or Matthew McConaughey is getting hogtied by rough trade.

It’s 1969 and Miami reporter Ward Jansen (McConaughey) returns to his Florida home town with his inexplicably British sidekick
(David Oyelowo). Ageing, sexually voracious death-row groupie Charlotte (Kidman) wants them to prove her betrothed (John Cusack) shouldn’t go to The Chair. But she also has a calamitous effect on Ward’s little brother Jack (Efron, mainly just in his scanties).

It’s soon clear Daniels (of Precious fame) is going less for coherent narrative drive, more for a heat-haze shimmer of racial and sexual tensions. You’d be hard-pressed to say the result is a good film but the gusto the cast expends means it’s hard to tear your eyes away.

Welcome To The Punch (15)DVD, Blu-ray, VoD

Admirably taking inspiration from the likes of Michael Mann and John Woo, promising British film-maker Eran Creevy carves a stylised homegrown actioner that sees an obsessive London detective (James McAvoy) attempt to nab an infamous career criminal (Mark Strong).

Despite a comparatively low budget, the film is impressively atmospheric, with Creevy capturing Canary Wharf with some evocative cinematography and a Mann-like blue-screen wash. Unfortunately, though, while there’s a few crunching set pieces, for the most part this Ridley Scott-produced shoot ’em up lacks intensity and momentum.

Let down by the script, the plot is sketchy and the characters are surface-level archetypes, which is especially disappointing given how good the cast is. McAvoy might be slightly miscast but he and Strong do their best to elevate the slender material.